TV Thursday: Gordon Ramsay ramps it up in Hell’s Kitchen (with video)

Season 12 of reality show still brings in the viewers

Hell’s Kitchen hails from the I Wanna Marry ‘Harry’ school of reality TV: It claims to be real, and on a superficial level it is. But that’s not why we watch.

We watch because it’s a train wreck, complete with colourful visuals and even more colourful language.

While Harry has struggled to find an audience, Hell’s Kitchen continues to appeal to younger viewers, which is why it continues to light a fire under the summer TV season.

Nine would-be chefs remain when Hell’s Kitchen returns, with chef Gordon Ramsay uncorking various variations on the F-word. That’s “f” for food, of course. What word did you think it was?

Yet, this has been a particularly unnerving season. The potential “winners” have been lacking, so much so that Ramsay has intimated that this season may be an awful mistake.

Gordon Ramsay

“I need to find a head chef,” he bellowed during one recent episode. “Not a head cook!”

That was one of the milder things he said that night. Most couldn’t be printed in a family newspaper — or posted on a family website. But that’s why it makes great TV. If a rational and informative cooking show is what you want, there’s always the Food network. Hell’s Kitchen is for foodies who think MasterChef needs more spice.

“How can you (mess) up fish and chips?” Ramsay shouted in one recent outing.

Funny for viewers, though. Bring on the next dish. And turn up the flames.

Hell’s Kitchen airs Thursday on City/Fox

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National TV columnist for Postmedia News Network.
Two solitudes:
“My dream is to have a bank of TVs where all the different channels are on at the same time and I can be monitoring them,” the social... read more critic Camille Paglia told Wired magazine, back in the day, before Big Brother and before Survivor. “I love the tabloid stuff. The trashier the program is, the more I feel it’s TV.”
And then there’s this, from Gilligan’s Island creator Sherwood Schwartz: “There’s a lot of underlying philosophy to the characters on Gilligan’s Island. They’re really a metaphor for the nations of the world, and their purpose was to show how nations have to get along together . . . or cease to exist.”
There you have it, then. The trashier a program is, the more it’s like TV. Or, if you prefer, TV is a metaphor for the nations of the world, and Gilligan’s Island was really a message about why we don’t all get along.
That’s where I come in.
My first TV memory was of being menaced by a Dalek on Doctor Who — the original, scratchy, black-and-white Who.
My more recent TV memories include the Sopranos finale; 9/11; Elvis Costello’s first appearance (and temporary banishment) on Saturday Night Live; what was really inside the Erlenmeyer flask in The X-Files; Law & Order (the original, and those iconic chimes); glued to the set at 3am local time during the 2003 war in Iraq — TV’s first real-time war —and Bart Simpson scrawling on the chalkboard in The Simpsons’ opening credits: “I Must Not Write All Over the Walls.”
Other Bart-isms, as seen on that TV chalkboard over the years: “I Will Never Win an Emmy,” “I No Longer Want My MTV,” and, pointedly — if a little hopefully — “Network TV is Not Dead.”
I was there to witness "the new dawn of the sitcom" in the mid-1990s, followed — inevitably — by the glut of terrible sitcoms in the early naughts, a glut that led, directly and indirectly, to the rise of reality TV.
There’s been a lot to talk about — good, bad and indifferent — about TV over the years.
That’s where you, and this space, come in. Read on. Enjoy, feel free to agree, disagree and dispute whenever you want. TV may be ugly at times, but it's a mirror of democracy in action. A funhouse mirror at times, a sober reflection at others.View author's profile